1. Technical Field
This invention is related to the field of computing systems and more specifically to the implementation of secure input through a keyboard.
2. Description of Related Art
Computing systems such as, personal computers (PC), laptop computers, and mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets) are widely used for a variety of daily tasks. Many tasks rely on a user entering a password or other form of secure code word to perform the task in order to confirm the identity of the user. “Identity thieves” (i.e., other people attempting to impersonate the user, often with malicious intent) may attempt to obtain a user's password by installing a software program onto the user's computer which may log key stokes from the user's keyboard and send the information to the identity thief through the internet or other communication channel. These software programs for logging user input may also be called “keyloggers” and are a form of malicious software (also referred to herein as “malware”). One way identity thieves may place a keylogger onto a user's computer is to hide the malware in an otherwise innocuous appearing software application that the user may install.
Once a keylogger is installed on a computer, every keystroke may be captured and sent to an identity thief. Anti-virus software installed on the computer may be capable of discovering the keylogger and removing it. In order to discover the keylogger, however, the anti-virus software must be able to recognize it. Therefore, anti-virus programs may be better at discovering known keyloggers that have been in use for some amount of time. A keylogger that has not been released by identity thieves may be immune to the anti-virus software for at least some period of time before a user discovers it and the anti-virus programmers can add the detection information to their anti-virus programs. During this period of time when the keylogger may be undetectable, any user with the keylogger unknowingly installed may be susceptible to having their information, in particular, their passwords, stolen, putting their sensitive information at risk.
Various techniques have been developed to thwart such key logging attempts. One such method is to employ a secure keyboard. A secure keyboard is a piece of hardware to replace a default keyboard that may be commonly used. The secure keyboard may encrypt the data sent from the keyboard to the computer and decrypt the data only after the data has passed the point that a keylogger may be able to read the data. In such a system, the keylogger may receive what may seem as incoherent gibberish that may be of no use to the identity thief receiving the logged data. Secure keyboards, however, may be costly and may not be available with features desirable to a given user.
A method is desired in which key logging software may be prevented from accessing data sent from an unsecure keyboard. Systems and methods for securely transferring data from a keyboard to a host processor in a computing system are presented herein.